One of my most anticipated films of the summer is Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time, which premieres in a few days in the Main Competition of the Cannes Film Festival. The first trailer has just dropped from A24, and it shows Robert Pattinson as a bank robber trying to get his accomplice — his brother, played by Benny Safdie — sprung from Rikers Island. Jennifer Jason Leigh appears as well as Buddy Duress, who co-starred in the Safdies’ previous Heaven Knows What. It’s a heartbreaker of a trailer scored to an original song by Oneohtrix Point Never and Iggy […]

One of my personal holy grails finally arrives on Blu-ray this week in the form of Olive Films’ release of Peter Medak’s bizarre, riveting The Men’s Club. Released in 1986, the film’s print ads promoted it as the successor to popular ensemble films like The Big Chill and The Breakfast Club, which is a little like trying to convince people to watch Abel Ferrara’s The Bad Lieutenant by comparing it to an episode of CHiPs. The Men’s Club follows a night in the life of a group of men (and what a group: David Dukes, Richard Jordan, Harvey Keitel, Frank […]

The following review contains spoilers. In Quentin Tarantino’s superbly balanced ensemble piece, The Hateful Eight, the passengers and drivers we meet at the start of the picture, dropped off at Minnie’s Haberdashy, a spacious Wyoming way station, by two different stagecoaches on different but overlapping missions, all have masked identities. Six years after the end of the Civil War, these are some of battle’s renegade residue, Confederate vets with few prospects who depend on bounty hunting to survive in a particularly testy postwar America. In the second coach there’s Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins, displaying the best of his high-energy talent), […]

Toronto seemed the perfect place for Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise to have its world premiere. The J. G. Ballard adaptation stages a class-war in an ultra-modern high-rise, and the theater where it played Sunday night is only about a mile from the luxury condo developments that tower over Toronto’s waterfront, which suggest a modern Eden in shiny glass and steel but have instead exacerbated the city’s homelessness problems and real-estate bubble. Another felicitous detail to the evening: the screening was sponsored by Visa and before you could take your seat to see Wheatley’s commentary on class and capitalism, there was a […]

“Complexity” is a word that Jane Weinstock likes to use when describing her ideal movie, and it’s certainly an attribute that could be applied to her own work. “I crave it as an audience member. I think people are contradictory, and I like that kind of psychological realism,” she says. The same word is an apt description for her own pathway into the director’s chair, especially for her most recent film, The Moment. It was a fulfilling journey for the filmmaker, but one she also calls “a really long struggle.” Weinstock has had a varied career, having gotten her start […]

NICOLE KIDMAN IN DIRECTOR NOAH BAUMBACH’S MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. COURTESY PARAMOUNT VANTAGE. If you believe what you read, Noah Baumbach’s films — sharp, witty, poignant and sometimes devastating — are drawn directly from his life. The son of Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown and novelist and film critic Jonathan Baumbach, Baumbach debuted as a writer-director in 1995 with his acclaimed Kicking and Screaming, the first of a number of films made during his twenties about New Yorkers in their twenties. After his second film, Mr Jealousy (1997), Baumbach admits that he got “derailed” and ended up making Highball […]